Client applications often are used to satisfy an information request requiring responses from a plurality of server applications. For example, a business frequently needs to know its daily sales from each of its divisions. To satisfy this information request, a client application contacts the server applications associated with each division to request sales activity. For each contacted server application, the client application negotiates access and executes a request for data (a "data access transaction"). Thus, to satisfy a single request, the client application transmits several data access transactions to several server applications.
To expedite the process of gathering information from several server applications, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards were developed to provide standard message formats for common information or service requests between trading partners. To implement EDI standards in mature data processing environments, software components have been created to map an EDI message received from a client application to a format expected by an existing server application. Where additional data items used by an existing server application are not defined as standard fields in the EDI structure, the standard allows a "user data construct" to be populated with the non-standard data. Over time, the user data construct has become an increasingly important section of the EDI message. When a client application must communicate with many server applications, a data mapping process is usually required to format these non-standard items within the user data constructs used by each server application. One of the primary disadvantages associated with EDI standards is that once a server application changes the format of its user data construct in the EDI message, the client application may be unable to communicate with the server application until the data mapping process is updated. That is, networks using the EDI standard are release dependent. Because of the large and costly effort involved. changing the standard message format to incorporate the data items contained in the user data constructs or coordinating release dependent data processing changes between enterprises is not practical. There is, therefore, a need for an improved system and method for executing a request from a client application.